Emma and Preston stared each other down across the stage. Just then, Pluto came unglued from Emma’s model and fell to the ground, smashing into pieces. The audience gasped. The judge stopped mid-sentence and went back over to discuss further with the other judges. It looked like Emma’s chances at winning had been shattered along with Pluto.
Jessie shook her head and mouthed to Emma, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“It’s okay,” Emma mouthed back.
The head judge came back to the microphone and announced, “And the winner, for her brilliant demonstration that Pluto is no longer considered a planet, thus smashing previous scientific theory, is Emma Ross!”
The audience broke into applause. Morgan, Christina, Jessie, and Luke all ran up onto the stage and pulled Emma into a huge group hug.
“Emma, we are so proud of you!” Christina exclaimed.
“Thank you! But why did you guys change your mind about coming?” Emma asked.
Morgan and Christina exchanged an awkward look, but Jessie jumped in before they could say anything. “Because they love you.”
“And we realized being here for you is more important than any job,” Christina said, giving Jessie a grateful look.
“Even if I never work for that studio again. Or any other studio,” Morgan added nervously. He looked up and whispered, “Please, Lord, don’t let me end up in TV.”
“Let’s go celebrate over a nice family dinner!” Jessie suggested.
“Dibs on sitting next to Jessie,” Luke said. He put his arm around Jessie as they all walked toward the door, letting his hand slip a little ways down her back. Without even looking, Jessie pushed his hand away.
“Forget it, Freckles.”
“I love victory sprinkles!” Emma exclaimed as she took a bite of her ice cream cone. The whole family, including Mr. Kipling, was enjoying ice cream in the penthouse kitchen.
Zuri was eating her ice cream from a bowl with no spoon, and her face was entirely covered in strawberry ice cream.
“Uh-oh!” she moaned. “Face freeze!”
Morgan lifted his face out of his bowl with even more ice cream smeared on his face. “Me too!” he said. “Don’t you hate that?”
“Hey, Ravi,” Luke asked, “what’s your favorite ice cream flavor?”
“All of them,” Ravi answered. “In India, we just had one kind: melted.”
Everyone giggled. “I’m just so glad the whole family is together,” Christina said, putting her arm around Emma and giving her a hug.
Just then, Mr. Kipling whipped his tail up, knocking the top scoop off of Jessie’s ice cream cone. It landed with a splat on the floor, and he quickly slurped it up.
“Except for him,” Jessie announced sternly. “You’re grounded, Mr. Kipling. Go to your cage.”
Mr. Kipling waddled out of the kitchen with his head down.
“Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this nanny stuff,” Jessie said, laughing.
It was the first day of a new school year, and Jessie was running late. She hurried to pack Ravi, Zuri, Emma, and Luke’s bags before they had to catch the bus. There were school supplies, lunches, and extra jackets everywhere. Jessie, sighing, scooped most of the mess up from Luke’s pile and shoved it all into his bag. She wasn’t sure exactly what he needed, but this way he would have anything he might need.
Bertram, the family’s formal butler, was humming to himself as he placed omelets in front of each of the Ross kids.
“Bertram, you look so happy. Did your Cheese of the Week come in?” Jessie asked.
“Better,” Bertram replied, beaming at her. “It’s the day I’ve waited for since summer began—the end of summer!”
“Try to contain yourself, Bertram,” Luke snorted. “You’re drooling in our eggs.”
“I’m excited too! I have enough back-to-school outfits to last until Easter,” Emma added happily.
“My plan for this year is to reduce my wedgie ratio to one per fortnight,” Ravi said.
“If you keep using words like ‘fortnight,’ it’s going to be a long, wedgie-rific year,” Luke replied.
Zuri wrinkled her nose. “I just don’t want a desk next to Gross Gus. He’s always shoving stuff up his nose. He claims he doesn’t know what happened to my magenta crayon, but I have a theory.”
Bertram interrupted her, picking up all of their plates. “Oh, my, look at the time. Don’t want to be tardy on your first day back,” he said.
“But I’m still eating,” Luke protested. He jumped up and followed Bertram to the sink, snagging the last few bites of his eggs before Bertram scraped the food off the plate and into the trash.
Jessie grabbed Luke’s arm and pulled him into the living room with his siblings. She handed out their backpacks and pushed them into the elevator so they could head to school.
“Bye! Love you! Miss you already!” Jessie called as the elevator doors shut. Then she burst into tears.
“I can’t believe you’re sad to see them go,” Bertram said.
“I’m not sad,” Jessie sobbed. “These are tears of joy! This has been the longest summer of my life!”
“Jessie, I’m shocked,” Bertram said, disbelief written all over his face. “I never thought we’d have something in common! I mean, besides the oversized feet and secret love of boy bands.”
“We’re finally free!” Jessie said gleefully, wiping away the last of her tears. She grabbed Bertram’s hand and they both jumped up and down, squealing happily.
Suddenly, the elevator doors slid open, and the Ross kids caught them celebrating. Jessie and Bertram stopped immediately and hung their heads in shame.
“Told you,” Luke said to his siblings.
“That’s just cold,” Zuri said, shaking her head in disapproval as the elevator doors closed again.
As soon as the doors were shut, Jessie and Bertram began jumping up and down again in excitement. They were free!
Emma was really excited for a brand-new school year at Walden Academy. A new school year meant new clothes, new sparkly notebooks, and new classes—like art.
She sat down at a two-person art table just as Shelby and her clique walked by. Shelby was one of the most popular girls in Emma’s class. She and her friends always wore clothes with their names embroidered on them. Emma didn’t have a problem with Shelby, but she did think that her outfits were sometimes a little much.
A tough-looking girl Emma had never seen before followed Shelby’s crew into the room. She was dressed all in black with a lot of chains and carried a beat-up tool bag as a purse.
Shelby spotted the new girl and made a disgusted face to her friends. “New-girl alert,” she said snidely. “Yikes, that outfit is puke-ular! What’s with all the chains? Did you just escape from fashion jail?” Shelby’s friends all laughed.
“What’s with all the makeup?” the new girl countered. “Did you just escape from clown college?”
Shelby continued to glare at her as the new girl plopped down in the seat next to Emma with a mean-looking scowl on her face.
“I like your chains!” Emma said, trying to be friendly. “Totally worth the half-hour backup at the metal detector, I’m sure.” The new girl’s look wasn’t really Emma’s thing either, but she had to admit it was stylish in a grunge sort of way. “I’m Emma.”
“Rosie,” the new girl said by way of intro-duction, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “I wear chains as a symbol of oppressed people everywhere. Plus, my diamond tiara is out for cleaning.”
“I hate it when they don’t give you a loaner,” Emma said sincerely.
Rosie looked at her in complete disbelief, but before she could say anything in response, the art teacher, Ms. Devlin, walked in. Ms. Devlin had a reputation for being a little bitter about her own failed art career.
“I’m Ms. Devlin; welcome to high school art, everyone,” she announced. “I look at all your enthusiastic faces and I think to myself, I hate my life. If only my art career had taken off. That said, let’s hav
e some fun! You have thirty seconds to draw a picture that tells me who you really are. Show me your essence!”
“So, where are you from?” Emma asked Rosie as they started drawing.
“Well, you go to Fifth Avenue, and keep walking north until you realize your purse is missing,” Rosie responded without looking up.
“Luckily, if you’re on Fifth Avenue, you can just buy another one,” Emma said matter-of-factly.
“Sounds like more talking than soul-searching going on over here,” Ms. Devlin said as she walked over to Emma and Rosie’s table. “If I cared enough, you’d both be in trouble. Rosie, let’s see your work.”
“It’s a skull and crossbones over a dollar sign,” Rosie said, holding up her picture. “It represents my wish for the death of capitalism and corporate greed.”
“Bummer. Emma, what does your essence look like?”
“A smiley daisy,” Emma answered.
“Wow,” Rosie said sarcastically. “You are about as deep as a kiddie pool.”
“Stop,” Emma protested. “You’re making my daisy sad.”
“Okay, class, working with your desk partner, your first big project will be to create an artistic statement about something you feel is wrong with the world,” Ms. Devlin said, assigning them their first homework.
“So, Rosie, you want to work at my place?” Emma said brightly. “I’d go to yours, but I kinda like this purse.”
“What I want is a different partner,” Rosie said to Ms. Devlin, ignoring Emma altogether.
“And I want my still-life portraits hanging at the Louvre. Deal with it,” Ms. Devlin replied.
Emma glared at Rosie. Why was the new girl being so mean?
Luke and Ravi’s first day wasn’t going much better. When they met up at their lockers between classes, Luke had to pull a “Kick Me” sign off of Ravi’s back.
“Dude, already?” Luke asked.
“Oh, I put that there,” Ravi answered matter-of-factly. “My scalp and I are tired of noogies, so I thought I would give the football team a new option.”
Luke shook his head and pulled his jacket out of his backpack. As he did, his favorite stuffed bear, Kenny the Koala, fell out of his bag, tangled up in his gym shorts and socks.
“Kenny the Koala?” Ravi asked, picking the bear up and handing him to Luke. “First-day jitters, brother?”
“No!” Luke exclaimed, trying to untangle Kenny. “Jessie must have accidentally shoved him in with all my stuff.”
Ravi laughed. “Whatever you have to tell yourself, bro.”
One of Luke and Ravi’s classmates, Billy, walked by with some of his friends and spotted Luke holding Kenny.
“Hey, Little Lukey, did you bring your teddy bear to school today?” Billy asked mockingly.
Luke pulled Kenny to his chest, embarrassed. “What bear? Oh, Kenny? I mean, this random bear? Never saw him before in my life,” Luke said loudly. Then he looked down at Kenny and whispered, “I’m sorry; just go with it.”
“Really. Then whose teddy-weddy is he?” Billy asked. Billy’s friends laughed.
Ravi looked at his brother and realized how embarrassed Luke was. Ravi grabbed Kenny away from Luke.
“Kenny is my teddy-weddy,” Ravi said. “Or to be more precise, my koala-walla.”
The bell rang, and Billy and his friends laughed as they headed off to class.
“We got ourselves a bear-lover, boys!” Billy shouted over his shoulder. “It’s gonna be a good year!”
Luke collapsed back against his locker in relief. “Thanks, Ravi! Wow, I can’t believe you took that hit for me!”
“Well, you are my brother and you have your reputation to uphold as a Big Man on Campus,” Ravi replied. “Whereas I am Barely a Man on Campus.”
“Well, good talk. I gotta get to class,” Luke said, getting his swagger back. “Let’s hug it out. Bring it in, bro.”
Ravi stretched out his arms for a hug. Luke reached out and grabbed Kenny, cuddling the stuffed bear close.
“I was talking to Kenny,” Luke said. “Daddy loves you, K-Bear. Be good for Uncle Ravi.”
Jessie was really enjoying her time off, even if the house was a little too quiet without the kids around. She’d plopped herself down in a big squishy chair in the Ross’s screening room and had been watching infomercials on their giant TV all afternoon. There were so many good deals on the infomercial channel. Jessie had already ordered a battery-powered foot-massager, a sweater folding board, and a crystal-encrusted cell phone case. She was in the process of ordering a really cool cutting machine for root vegetables.
“It slices and dices?” Jessie was saying to the infomercial operator over the phone as Zuri walked in. “I can’t afford not to! Wait, how much is shipping and handling? That’s ridiculous—I live in New York, not Siberia!”
Jessie hung up the phone. No matter how cool the cutting tool was, she couldn’t afford thirty-five dollars for shipping.
“Zuri! Welcome home,” she said brightly. “How was your first day of school?”
“Horrible! I got homework! That I can’t do with crayons!” Zuri whined. “It’s downright un-American. Our Founding Fathers built this great country on the separation of home and work.”
“No, they didn’t,” Jessie replied calmly. “And obviously, we should start with history.”
“I’m not interested in anything that happened B.Z. You know, Before Zuri,” Zuri said. “Who cares about a bunch of old guys in wigs?”
“Those ‘old guys’ had to combine thirteen colonies into a country. You just have to combine five vocab words into a sentence. Any more arguments?” Jessie asked.
“Give me liberty or give me death!” Zuri exclaimed. She grabbed the remote and changed the channel to cartoons.
“Give me a break. And the remote,” Jessie demanded. She plucked the remote from Zuri’s hand and replaced it with Zuri’s homework. Zuri stuck her tongue out as Jessie walked toward the living room to greet the other kids. “But keep that tongue in your mouth,” Jessie added without turning around.
Jessie walked into the living room to find Emma and Rosie coming out of the elevator.
“Whoa,” Rosie said, looking around the penthouse in amazement. “This room is bigger than my whole apartment. And I live with my mom, dad, grandma, three brothers, two sisters, and four rats—six if it’s really cold.”
“We don’t have any rats, but we have a Bertram,” Jessie replied with a laugh. “He has beady eyes and whiskers and he loves cheese.”
“Rosie’s here to work on a project,” Emma explained. “Rosie, this is Jessie, my nanny.”
“A nanny?” Rosie asked. “Where do you keep the footmen and the stable boys?”
“Emma, you haven’t told her about the country estate?” Jessie said, teasing them.
“Hey, Rosie,” Emma said. “Before we start, why don’t we sit at the table and have a little chitchat?” She was determined to find a way to get along with her grumpy partner.
Rosie hesitated but sat down at the table with Emma. They looked at each other silently for an awkward moment.
“So…” Emma finally asked. “What do you like to do for fun?”
“Stick it to the man,” Rosie answered.
“Oh-kay,” Emma replied slowly. She was going to keep asking questions until she found some common ground with Rosie. “But do you ever, like, play volleyball? Or go to the movies? Or, you know…not make people uncomfortable?”
“No, but I am setting up a rally in Times Square to protest deforestation,” Rosie said.
“Speaking of deforestation, have you ever thought of plucking your eyebrows?” Emma said brightly, thinking they may have something to talk about after all.
But Rosie looked offended. “No, I’m very happy with the one I have.”
“But my mom says everyone loves a makeover,” Emma protested. The conversation was not going at all the way she wanted it to. “That’s how she sold enough beauty products to pay for the new helipad.”
<
br /> “Hashtag Most Obnoxious Sentence Ever,” Rosie said, rolling her eyes.
“Hashtag Nuh-uh!” Emma shot back.
“Look, princess, you and I will never have anything in common,” Rosie said, checking her watch and standing up. “Let’s talk tomorrow, okay? To get back to the Bronx, I have to take three trains to where my aunt picks me up on her scooter.”
“So the Bronx is a real place?” Emma asked, her eyes wide in disbelief. “I thought it was imaginary, like Narnia or Staten Island.”
The next day, Emma was not looking forward to art class. She arrived early, ready to get a fresh start with Rosie, but as soon as Rosie walked in, Emma realized the odds weren’t in her favor.
“Oh, you all showed up. In that case, take your seats,” Ms. Devlin said in a bored voice. “You should keep working on your projects. Maybe someday you’ll be as successful as Bobo the Chimp. His finger paintings edged out my landscapes for a spot at the Guggenheim. I really hate that monkey.”
“I think Ms. Devlin could use some bran,” Emma whispered to Rosie as she sat down next to her. “She looks constipated.”
Rosie pulled her phone out of her bag and turned on the record feature. “Hey, do you mind if I record our brainstorming sessions?” Rosie asked Emma. “I don’t want to miss any of your supersmart ideas.”
“Sure!” Emma said brightly. Maybe she and Rosie would end up as friends after all. “Jessie’s always saying she can’t believe the stuff that comes out of my mouth.”
“I’ll bet. You know, I have an awesome idea for our presentation,” Rosie said, leaning forward conspiratorially. “But to make it work, you’d have to dress up like a beautiful doll.”
“I can do that! I love fashion!” Emma said, clapping with excitement. “Um, but is it all right if I pick out my own outfit?”
“Whatever you think is best,” Rosie nodded. “You’re the fashion guru. And since you’re going to be the presenter, I will take care of everything else.”
Jessie: New Nanny (Jessie Junior Novel Book 2) Page 3